Dispatch box

Ministers are permitted to use ordinary lockable briefcases to transport information which has been classified 'Confidential' or below. For information with a higher security level (such as 'Secret') they are required to use dispatch boxes, which offer a higher level of security, and which are usually red. However a travel version of the despatch box is also available in black, which offers the same level of security as a red despatch box, but is designed to be less conspicuous. In practice Ministers use despatch boxes for transporting the majority of their documents due to the greater level of security they offer.

Confound it, man! You're being a bloody fool. Drop that pistol and come out with my dispatch box. I'll see that you get a fair trial.

Winston Churchill's old dispatch box has been sold for £158,500 – over 25 times more than it was expected to fetch. The red leather box was used by Churchill in his time as secretary of state for the colonies, a position he held from February 1921 until October 1922.

It was about the only attempt at humour Raymond had made at the dispatch box that year, which may have been the reason so few members laughed.

Officials are used to finding graffiti on the priceless fixtures and fittings in the House of Commons chamber. Teams of French polishers regularly repair damage caused by tourists. But during a recent examination they noticed that the beautifully-carved government Dispatch Box was covered in strange black pen marks. At the next Prime Ministers Questions they stood watch, and caught the culprit in the act. As Gordon Brown gesticulated wildly with his black marker pen, stabbing at the papers in front of him and missing to hit the wood beneath, the awful truth was clear. The PM was the vandal. […] The boxes were a gift from New Zealand after the rebuilding of the House of Commons following the Second World War. The are modelled on the dispatch boxes in the Australian parliament and are made from a strong, teak-like wood from the rare Puriri tree and were thought to be almost indestructible.

There is a familiar pattern that has come to define Theresa May's premiership. Encouraging rhetoric gets periodically wheeled out: the pledges to ease the burden on the "just about managing"; the promises to fight the "burning injustices" of social inequality. But then a few weeks later, the chancellor gets up at the dispatch box to deliver a budget or an autumn statement and it's as if those words had never been uttered.

Downing Street has refused to restart Brexit deal negotiations despite Michael Gove performing a U-turn at the dispatch box in which he praised a "constructive move" by the EU minutes after declaring the talks "effectively ended".